Announcing FastPass+ Finder application

I’ve been a Disney passholder for quite a number of years, and one of the most frustrating parts of it is not being able to get on the most popular rides in the various parks, whether because the lines are overwhelmingly long or all of the FastPass+ available is gone for the day you’re visiting the park. Sometimes, FastPass entries free up by others cancelling their reservation, but you have to be lucky to find it before someone else grabs the spot.

A friend of mine brought to my attention a Python script that attempted to find an open FastPass entry for a selected ride through an automated testing script, that is it would run a test version of Chrome and pretend to be a user clicking on webpage elements until it found what you were looking for. It was definitely not very user friendly, as you needed some enhanced knowledge on how to set up a Python environment on your computer, how to edit webpages to find information embedded in the page’s code, how to find and install the right web testing drivers for your computer, and so on. I thought there had to be an easier way to do it. For those interested, here’s the original project by Ethan Brimhall: https://github.com/ethanbrimhall/Disney-Fastpass-Bot

Over a couple of days, I put together a Windows application that borrows from Ethan’s original idea, using automated website testing, and enhances it. Gone is the Python requirement (any recent Windows 7/8/10 computer should be able to run it), and gone is the webpage editing requirement (the utility can retrieve your guest list from the Disney FastPass+ site and allows you to specify all of the FastPass guests you want to include in your FastPass booking). I re-did the webpage searching to be a bit more resilient to long webpage load times, and can also handle some instances of when the website breaks (the dreaded “Olaf” screen).

Once you launch the application, you’ll first need to build the guest list. Enter your username and password (the app will remember your email address but *will not* store your password), and click the Get Guest List button. This will launch the test Chrome instance and get your guest list from the Disney site, and save that list into the Available Guests list in the app. Then, to find your FastPass, you need to select the guests you want to attend and move them into the Guests Attending list by clicking the Right Arrow button (you can remove guests from the attending list by using the Left Arrow button), and then select the Park, Ride, and Start Time (First Available picks the first time that shows up, otherwise a specific value for a preferred start time) and clicking the Find Your FastPass+ button.

Once searching starts, the only thing you will have to do on the Disney website is to pick the date of your visit. Watch for this page to load, manually pick your date, and the app will pick your park for you and begin hunting for an available FastPass+ reservation for your chosen ride. This can take some time (took me three days to find a time for the Avatar ride in Animal Kingdom), so leave the app and the Chrome web instance running in the background. As soon as the app finds a time for you, it will automatically confirm it for you.

This app is most definitely BETA right now, meaning there is still a lot to do. This app also only works for the Florida parks (my login doesn’t allow me to choose parks outside of my own account’s access, which is the Orlando WDW resort area). Coming up in future versions: an in-app help file, date selection automation, notification of successful confirmation of FastPass+ reservation, statistic tracking (how many times did we search before finding something, how many times did Olaf show up, etc), and more. In the meantime, if you run across any issues or have any ideas you think would work well, feel free to email us at [email protected]

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